Proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander 17–24 year olds participating in post-school education, training or employment increased from 32 per cent in 2002 to 40 per cent in 2012-13.

Dreise and Thomson (2014: 1) identify that the PISA results of 2013 in mathematics, scientific and reading literacy show Indigenous 15 year olds remain two and a half years behind their non-Indigenous peers in school, the same as a decade ago. Evaluating the CSIRO Indigenous STEM Education Project | Michael TynanEvaluating the CSIRO Indigenous STEM Education Project | Michael TynanFigure 1: Estimated year 12 students obtaining an ATAR of 50% or above, 2007-2013* (Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage 2014)*Note that the percentage is of the number of students estimated to be in year 12. This estimation is obtained by dividing the number of 15-19 year old Australian residents by five. This method of estimation comes with significant errors. Such errors are even more significant for the Indigenous data as the residential data of 15-19 year olds is also an estimation based on birth and fertility rates. In addition, variables such as retention rates beyond year 10 have not been considered. Due to this, the ATAR graphs obtained from the OID data should be used with caution.Evaluating the CSIRO Indigenous STEM Education Project | Michael TynanFigure 2: Mean differences between Australian and New Zealand Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in science literacy and engagement in science expressed in standard deviation units (Woods-McConney et al., 2013: 241).McConney et al., (2011: 2026) showed individual SES and Indigenous status to explain just less than 25% of difference. However, reading literacy accounts for an additional 62% and mathematics literacy accounts for a further 6% of variance. In total 93% of variation explained for this sample of students